Write across the world.

For many, travel is about the place where they are going, it is an itinerary of sites they’ve seen in movies or read about in books. In other words, it is where they are going and what they are going to do that matters. After all, to go to Rome without visiting the Coliseum or throwing a coin into the Trevi Fountain would be travel sacrilege. Yet what if we could change that? What if we made the move from what you are going to see to how you’re going to see it?
Recently, I arrived home from a five month trip to Europe where I visited fourteen new countries and met countless people. I climbed castles and danced at a couple good ceilidhs in Scotland, got chased and incredibly ill in Barcelona, and got overwhelmingly lost in every major city that I visited.
Coming home and returning to my job as a barista, I have been asked countless times by customers how my trip was, to which I smile and give them the standard answer that it was lovely. Until, however, the manager of a nearby jewellery store asked instead, “Quick! What was your favourite thing that happened to you?”
Into my head popped a thousand memories all vying for first place, the one that stood out amongst the rest though was my first night in Paris with Clare, a fellow Canadian that I had met in Luxembourg a few days before. We decided, at 10 o’clock at night, to take a walk with no particular destination in mind. It wasn’t long before we were entirely lost and had decided that instead of trying to get back to our beds we would try to get to the Eiffel Tour instead. It didn’t look that far away on the map.
It took two hours and by midnight it had started to pour, we arrived just before one, dripping wet in the park next to the tower, staring up for the first time in our lives at this incredible sight. I’m not sure why but I had never imagined that it would be so big. At the stroke of one, the Tower burst into a barrage of twinkling flashing lights and we laughed at our luck, a few moments later the entire Tower went dark.
The Eiffel Tower is pretty in broad daylight and beautiful when lit up but what I found that night as I stood staring up at it, drenched to the bone, was that at night it is mysterious. When I think of the Tower now, I don’t think about the days that followed with it always on the horizon looking like a postcard, I think of that night and how it was hard and dark and incredibly enchanting just like the city that it stands guard over.
That is how I will always remember Paris.